her in any way.
“Chitchat?” he said. “Nice weather we’re having”—and he began to laugh and then to snuffle.
“Visibility is excellent,” she said. “Not a cloud in sight.”
“Okay, wait,” he said. “I don’t like this game. The weather’s important to me—oh, forget it.” And the snuffling got worse. She told him to stop.
“I can’t. It’s probably three in the morning. I have a sister now. I need to get out of here.”
“You can,” she said. “Cry now, and what will you do tomorrow? Or the day after that? We could be here months.”
“Months? Don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s possible. So all I’m suggesting is: ration.”
“I don’t think you can run out of misery. We’ve been kidnapped; I can be miserable for as long as we’re here.”
“Wrong, wrong.” Sitting up. “You can dry out. Lose your ability to feel. One day you are sobbing for the beauty and horror of it all, and the next you are Stonehenge.”
“These fucking hoods,” he said. “I can’t breathe.”
Only he was breathing fine. In and out—what more did he want? He was afraid of small spaces, hated the elevator, and had earlier complained that his face was aswelter. There was no way to doff the hoods, and breathing at a clip only made the sensation worse. Anne-Janet had suggested he visualize, and to the extent she had stopped hearing the suck and wheeze of his lungs, it had worked. You are sitting on the bottom of the ocean and observing the sky. After a while, he’d asked how she’d gotten so adept in the pursuit of calm and she said, MRI. Four every year. Spend enough time in the coffin space of an MRI and you become inured to its terrors. If Ned understood that she was, with this response, vanishing the difference between arming yourself against fear and not needing the armor at all, he did not say. He did not have to. Anne-Janet knew the difference; she wore armor on her teeth.
“You’re doing fine,” she said. “But if the ocean thing isn’t working, maybe try to think of yourself as one of those hawks who wears a hood to keep calm. And maybe, if it helps, that the falconer is your mom. Or a friend. I dunno.”
She could hear him shifting in his cot, turning on his side. Maybe he was fetal. Maybe he was thinking about how to flirt, too. Equally mindful of the bad timing of it all, the inappropriateness of it all, but willing to go out on that limb just the same.
“Remember our speed date?” he said. “How I told you I’m adopted? Just found out? Remember that part? Mom’s not so high on my list these days.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Let’s just stick with the ocean. I’m on the floor, too. It’s sort of mushy.”
“Lot of fish, though.”
“Yeah? What kind?”
“I don’t know. But they’re tropical.”
“What are they saying?”
“Not much. I do all the talking.”
She smiled and laughed and then, for laughing, she blushed. Blushed in the dark, which bereaved the color of its biological purpose, which was to wile. So this was wiling the blind.
“Ned, do you think we’re actually in danger?” and she tried to sound in earnest, a little timid but ready to blossom at the first sign of hope. Because the fact was, she didn’t think they were in danger, but then she was not asking for his opinion so much as trying to undo the impression she had given him that she was bossy. After all, for the purpose of shooting up an ordeal with amorous content, wasn’t panic the grail? She should grope for his lapels. Weep into his collar. Fling her arms around his neck and heave with bosom cleaved to his chest.
“Definitely,” he said. “I think we’re going to die here. Unless—do you think we’re going to die?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she meant it, because if the danger wasn’t mortal, it was spiritual, her spirit in free fall the longer this conversation failed to twin up their fears in lust.
Back and forth. She weighed her options.
At home: a sick mom and the burden of caring for this mom, which would fall to her alone. That, plus an emotional terrain that smoldered as though after a great fire but that could yield up nothing new, and in this the paradox of trauma: the past could live on in you with an energy you could never muster for the life that was happening to you now. And just think: tomorrow, she could be